mjhjmtu

Which packages are installed with the Ubuntu minimal server option (e.g. on 16.04, Xenial)?

Is the minimal server installation congruent with the packages listed in:
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/ubuntu-minimal

First off, it's not just those packages that ubuntu-minimal depends on, you have to consider everything they depend on as well, all the way down the dependency tree (this works out to about 450 packages if I remember correctly which is about the same as a basic install of Debian).

Depending on exactly what you mean by 'minimal server', you may additionally have the ubuntu-server and/or ubuntu-standard packages, which pull in some other stuff as well.

Keep in mind as well when going through these dependency trees that the Ubuntu installer also pulls in many of the packages listed as 'recommended' or 'suggested' by the direct dependencies of the packages being installed.

Anything beyond that is going to be dependent on what you need this info for. If you just want the package list out of curiosity, that should be enough. If you're trying to build a container image or a chroot, just use the official ones instead (it's a lot easier to rip out what you don't need than to build one from scratch). If you're trying to figure out what you can depend on with a bare-minimum Ubuntu install, don't, and just explicitly call out dependencies for what you need.